Back and blogging

Well it’s been a hell of a great week – SVPCA, Dinosaur Planet, new museums, public lectures and a chance to catch up with dozens of friends and colleagues meaning that more projects are moving again and fresh things are starting. All of that capped off with unseasonally lovely weather.The meeting was a big one by the standards of this conference with nearly 120 delegates, more talks than ever before and representatives of 18 countries. Given that this is obstensibly a British meeting, to have people from Canada, the US, India, Ireland, Finland, France, Hungary and others was great and makes the whole thing rather more international than normal.

I’ll be writing up a few bits over the next few days, but I thought it best to give a whirlwind tour of my SVPCA highlights. Since the abstracts are up online I’m hardly giving anything away, though clearly the real talks gave much more flesh to the subjects than a few lines of text did.

Matt Wedel spoke of a new and very large prosauropod from South Africa. Not only is thing getting of for the size of Diplodocus but shows every sign of being bipedal.

Dave Unwin, Eric Buffetaut and Brian Andres all presenting on new pterosaur taxa from the Jurassic.

David Button’s revision of Dave Unwin’s (his supervisor) pterosaur analyses put the anurognathids to the base of the tree, something I’ve long supported and nice to see happening with this dataset.

Ed Drewitt gave a progress report on the outreach work on the Bristol Dinosaur Project. it was nice to see sci-comms get a speaking slot at a conference like this and obviously during my time at Bristol I was involved in this and it’s great to see how it has progressed and expanded.

Finally Don Henderson showed off the newly discovered ankylosaur from northern Alberta. I don’t know the group well, but I don’t think I’m engaging in hyperbole when I say it has the potential to be the greatest ever specimen for this clade. Large, articulated and with all the osteoderms intact and articulated, and these are rings by complete skin impressions! The detail was stunning and while it will be a long time before this is prepared and ready for study it’s already clear just how great this will be.